Friday, April 18, 2008

Ebooks are usually in the PDF format, so it would be useful if you could bookmark a page on a PDF file you are reading, just like you bookmark a page in a real book. That can be done in Acrobat Reader with a small hack. Now Acrobat Reader is such a resource hog that you might not want to use it. Even I don't use it. Recently, I wrote about another PDF reader, the Adobe Reader Lite which is much faster and lighter than the original version. This hack works with the Lite version too.

Download Bookmark JavaScript for Acrobat Reader. Unzip it, and then copy it into your Acrobat Reader JavaScript's directory (/Adobe/Reader 8.0/Reader/Javascripts). Now open any PDF file with Acrobat Reader or Acrobat Reader Lite. Scroll a few pages and then open the View menu. Here you will find 4 new options - Bookmark this page, Go to bookmark, Remove bookmark and Clear bookmarks. (Note: you can't see the bookmark items when a PDF file is opened to the first page. You have to get to at least the second page for the bookmark items to become visible). The items are self explanatory. You can create as many bookmarks you want in a single PDF file. "Remove bookmark" will allow you to remove a single bookmark and "Clear bookmarks" wipes out all the bookmarks.

The bookmarks created by this JavaScript aren't PDF bookmarks that get saved with the document. They behave more like web browser bookmarks in that they enable you to quickly return to a specific PDF page.

I can't believe that Adobe hasn’t thought of this. I have a 1198 page study file and this plug-in has made all the difference. I can now refer back to my bookmarks and get the information needed right away.

If you are using Adobe acrobat 9 you can open the document preferences (right click on the document) and then check "Restore Last view settings when reopening documents" This way your file will always open in the last page you read or where you close your document. Hope it helps too! Cheers

Restore last view point works better I think. The bookmarks display across all PDF's for privacy reasons that isn't to good. Then if you click a bookmark from one PDF made in another it causes an error. I'm getting an error now with the javascript "An internal error occurred"

I've been using PDF-XChange Viewer for a while now. It's free, seems faster than Acrobat reader, and has a lot of nice features like bookmarks and the ability to modify PDF files by adding text, highlighting text, etc. Windows only, unfortunately.

This is for the internal error code when using the above plug-in on Adobe Reader 9 fresh install for windows.In Adobe reader 9 you have to right click the document your reading and look in the page display settings under java script and make sure the following are checked off after you have installed the plug in : enable acrobat java script,enable menu items java script execution privileges,and enable global object security policy.

Thx for sharing this tip. If java developer want to develop an API to create PDF file in java language which can also incorporate all the features of pdf then use the following online API: http://www.aspose.com/java/pdf-component.aspx